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    Conditional variational autoencoders for cosmological model discrimination and anomaly detection in cosmic microwave background power spectra

    Tian-Yang Sun1, Tian-Nuo Li1, He Wang2,3,*, Jing-Fei Zhang1, and Xin Zhang1,4,5,†

    • *Contact author: hewang@ucas.ac.cn
    • †Contact author: zhangxin@neu.edu.cn

    Phys. Rev. D 114, 043547 – Published 25 August, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/b4kr-srbk

    Abstract

    The cosmic microwave background power spectra are a primary window into the early universe. However, achieving interpretable compression and fast inference diagnostics under weak model assumptions remains challenging. We propose a parameter-conditioned variational autoencoder (CVAE) that aligns a data-driven latent representation with cosmological parameters while retaining an interface to likelihood-style diagnostic tests. The model achieves high directional reconstruction fidelity for the DℓTT, DℓEE, and DℓTE spectra in just five latent dimensions. It reconstructs spectra for several test cases beyond the Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, including controlled parameter extrapolations, and enables an amortized surrogate diagnostic that reduces one representative post-training Markov chain Monte Carlo run from ∼40 hours on CPU cores to ∼2  minutes on a graphics processing unit in this demonstration. The learned latent space shows a distributed, partially structured organization that mirrors known cosmological parameters and their degeneracies. It also provides representation-space discrimination diagnostics for distinguishing tested cosmological spectra from a fiducial reference. Overall, this physics-informed CVAE supports interpretable compression, rapid diagnostic exploration, and anomaly-sensitive representation learning beyond ΛCDM.

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